Nexus 5 Throwback

Lets take a break and look back. On October 31 2015, Google had released the Nexus 5, together with Android KitKat. You probably already know its specs, so i wouldn’t go too deep on it.

It has a Snapdragon 800 chip with Adreno 330, 2GB RAM and a 1080p screen. It runs the latest version of Android Lollipop ( and most likely the unreleased Android 6.0 Marshmallow ). After almost a year, how well has it aged? Let’s find out.

Performance

With Snapdragon 800 Chip with 2GB RAM, it is still considered a high end device, so gaming is not a problem at all. When playing graphically demanding games, the phone can get warm, no surprises here. With the release of Android Lollipop 5.0, it came with quite a few issues, annoying or not, one of them is the memory leak.

They quickly fixed it in 5.1, but the issue is still there, but not as severe as before. I am running on stock ROM & stock kernel, i need to restart it everyday to flush out those memory. Since I use the Nexus 5 as my daily driver, it is quite annoying.

Google did a fantastic job on optimizing the OS ( except the memory leak ). The phone is still buttery smooth , it only stutters a little on rare occasions , performance definitely saw a great improvement from KitKat . I will not talk about benchmarks here because they often don’t reflect real world performance .

Multitasking

With 2GB of RAM and pure Android software, multitasking is excellent. I can open all 5 apps ( Google+, WhatsApp, PowerAMP, Chrome, and Messaging ), play Clash of Clans for 5min, and those apps didn’t need to reload .

Switching apps is still very fast , only on rare occasions did the launcher redraw after playing some RAM consuming / graphically demanding apps- a noticeable improvement in multitasking performance from KitKat.

Battery

Battery life is as important as performance. With 2300mAh battery, the nexus 5 survives the day with light usage. I leave house at 7am with a fully charged battery, and reaches home around 6pm with 10% left. I uses Google+ quite often , sometimes browsing Facebook on Chrome and use WhatsApp frequently. I have my 3G enabled all the time, and WiFi scanning in the background. Medium and heavy usage probably will kill the battery pretty fast

Conclusion

The Nexus 5 aged pretty well, and it has continued to get updated by Google. I would recommend anyone that wants to get a budget but high end spec phone to get the Nexus 5 .